Storagebod recently had the chance to chat to Amitabh Srivastava, head of EMC’s Advanced Software division and one of the principal architects of ViPR.
Srivastava is not a storage guy - in fact, his previous role with Microsoft sticks him firmly in the compute/server camp - but cited his experience in building out the Azure …

Re: um...

This sounds like it will make it easier for EMC's frenemy Cisco to bring the EMC stack further into Cloupia. Why would you want to automate the storage stack when you can bring it into the whole stack? I also heard mention of management but what of measurement and reporting? Will performance and reporting APIs for EMCs wide array of products be exposed so third parties won't need a proxy?

I get there's the file/object aspect of ViPR but that might be exposed by Openstack anyway won't it? It seems like EMC saw itself being painted into a corner with their many closed APIs and figured they'd have to open up to play in the new private cloud datacenter so they might as well productize it. Hence ViPR.

Everyone else who isn't already open with their APIs is probably thinking the same thing but EMC likes to pre-announce products far ahead of reality so they look visionary.